State of the Union: Interview With U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

Interview

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Dana, over the past two days, the United States Border Patrol has experienced a 50 percent drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week before Title 42 ended at midnight on Thursday.

It is still early. We are in day three, but we have been planning for this transition for months and months. And we have been executing on our plan. And we will continue to do so.

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It is too early. But the numbers that we have experienced over the past two days are markedly down over what they were prior to the end of Title 42.

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So we have seen, I think, approximately 6,300 on Friday and about 4,200 yesterday by the United States Border Patrol. And we saw over 10,000 before the end of Title 42 earlier last week.

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Because we have communicated very clearly a vitally important message to the individuals who are thinking of arriving at our Southern border.

There is a lawful, safe, and orderly way to arrive in the United States. That is through the pathways that President Biden has expanded in an unprecedented way. And then there's a consequence if one does not use those lawful pathways, and that consequence is removal from the United States, a deportation and encountering a five-year ban on reentry and possible criminal prosecution.

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I would respectfully disagree.

We have been planning for months and months, over a year-and-a half. We have surged resources asylum officers, Border Patrol agents, processing coordinators to do the data entry work, so our Border Patrol agents can be out in the field.

We have expanded our holding capacity in Border Patrol stations. We have added beds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in our detention facilities. We have increased our transportation resources, the number of flights, removal flights, with our foreign partners. We're setting up regional processing centers now.

It's extraordinary what we have done over the past 18 months or so.

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So, the asylum system has been and continues to be a jewel of the United States. We take great pride as a country in this world to provide humanitarian relief for those who qualify.

But the landscape of migration has changed dramatically over the past 10-plus years. No longer are individuals arriving at our border of their own volition. They are arriving in the hands of smugglers that wreak such tragedy, such trauma upon their lives.

The cartels, the smuggling organizations, control the land. And so we have not only a security imperative, but a humanitarian responsibility to cut those smugglers out. And that's precisely what we, as an administration, has done. We have attacked the smuggling organizations with our law enforcement authorities.

We have arrested more than 10,000 smugglers. But President Biden has led the greatest expansion of lawful pathways ever through family reunification programs, through expedited refugee processing, through the regional processing centers that we're now building.

But we have an obligation to deliver consequences at our border to not only manage our border, but to cut the smugglers out.

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I have not.

We have been calling on Congress to pass legislation to fix what everyone agrees is a broken immigration system. We have been asking for that for more than two decades. On day one of his presidency, President Biden presented a legislative package.

The proposal right now, what we are asking for, and we are really in need of desperately as a country, is immigration reform to fix the system, not to dismantle it...

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... which is what this proposal really provides.

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Dana, I am focused on the work in front of us, meeting the challenge, not only with respect to the Southern border, but meeting the challenge of cyber, the cyber threat from cyber criminals and adverse foreign nation states.

I am focused on the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events. I am focused on the adverse actions of the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Iran, Russia. I am focused on the work of the Department of Homeland Security. I will continue to focus on that work throughout my tenure.

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Thank you, Dana.

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